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Tuesday, September 6th, 2016
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| 12:00p | Top 10 Data Center Stories of the Month: August Here are the 10 most popular stories that appeared on Data Center Knowledge in August: HIPAA Breach Case Results in Record $5.5M Penalty – Advocate Health Care Network has agreed to pay a record $5.5 million to settle claims that it violated the security rule of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), resulting in data breaches that compromised the records of roughly 4 million people. Delta Data Center Outage Grounds Hundreds of Flights – According to the most recent survey, the average cost of a single data center outage in 2015 was $740,000. The most expensive reported outage last year was about $2.4 million.  Travelers wait in line at the Delta check-in counter at LaGuardia Airport , August 8, 2016 in the Queens borough of New York City. Delta flights around the globe were grounded and delayed on Monday morning due to a system outage. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images) Spirit of Competition: Nutanix Certifies Cisco UCS Hardware – It’s the kind of arm’s-length handshaking announcement that would merit a relatively small point size for its headline, were it not for the fact that Cisco and Nutanix are clear competitors in the emerging hyperconvergence space.  Rendering of a data center filled with Nutanix appliances (Source: Nutanix video) Google Gives Facebook’s Open Rack a 48V Makeover – While data center racks designed by Facebook and Google share many common principles – a shared power source for multiple servers in the rack is one example – two aspects have been radically different: server input voltage and physical depth of the rack. Facebook’s racks are 800 mm deep, while Google’s are 660 mm; Facebook’s input voltage is 12V, while Google’s is 48V. What Facebook Has Learned from Regularly Shutting Down Entire Data Centers – The idea to do these kinds of stress tests was born after Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on internet infrastructure on the East Coast in 2012.  Entrance to a hot aisle in a data hall at Facebook’s Altoona, Iowa, data center. (Photo: @2014 Jacob Sharp Photography) What is the Data Center Cost of 1kW of IT Capacity? – It’s no secret that bigger data centers benefit from economies of scale. It costs less to provide X amount of data center capacity in a massive warehouse-scale facility than it does in a small data center. How Renewable Energy is Changing the Data Center Market – While good publicity and the promise of energy cost savings sometime down the line are good enough reasons for a company like Google to commit tens of millions of dollars to renewable energy purchase contracts for its data centers, companies that provide various data center services to many users are working with a very different set of considerations.  (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images) Intel Rolls Out First Silicon Photonics Products for Data Center Networks – Silicon photonics, a technology that’s reportedly been in development for about 16 years, is finally here as a product, and if it wasn’t for the world’s hunger for cloud services (and cloud service providers’ eagerness to provide them), the technology could have remained an interesting science project for many more years to come.  The Intel Silicon Photonics 100G PSM4 Optical Transceiver (Photo: Intel) CenturyLink Data Center Team Keeps Eye on the Ball Despite Uncertain Future – While it may be interesting to ponder what will happen to CenturyLink’s data center colocation business once the company finalizes whatever ends up being the outcome of the “strategic review” it announced last year, David Meredith, who oversees that business, has work to do.  Inside a CenturyLink data center. (Photo: CenturyLink) One Data Center Standard to Rule Them All? – This group says it is going to solve the problem of too many data center standards, by creating just one more. |
| 5:51p | Reubens’ Global Switch Says It’s in Talks With Asian Investors (Bloomberg) — Global Switch, a data center operator owned by London’s billionaire Reuben Brothers, said Sunday it’s in talks to sell a stake to Asian investors. A newspaper’s report that the discussions are with a Chinese consortium sparked criticism from a former U.K. intelligence official. The U.K.-based company operates data centers in London, Hong Kong and Sydney, which house web servers for the financial and telecommunications industries as well as governments. It has the largest “footprint” in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, according to its corporate brochure. Parent company Aldersgate Investments Ltd. is in discussions with a “consortium of high quality private sector Asian investors,” Global Switch said Sunday in an e-mailed statement. Aldersgate and the consortium would exercise joint control of Global Switch. No transaction has been concluded, the statement said. See also: Inside EdgeConneX’s Massive European Data Center Buildout China TiesThe Sunday Times reported that British brothers David and Simon Reuben, who own Aldersgate Investment Management, are talking with a consortium led by Daily Tech, which provides space for Internet servers for companies including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and EBay Inc. The newspaper said Daily Tech has the backing of a dozen investors including Avic Trust, a subsidiary of the state-owned Aviation Industry Corp. of China. Malcolm Rifkind, former head of the U.K. Parliament’s intelligence and security committee and foreign secretary in 1995-97, urged the government to examine the security risks of selling a stake to China. “The government needs to be satisfied there are no risks involved,” Rifkind told the Sunday Times. He added that he expects any decision on intervention by the government to be based on advice from security services including intelligence agency GCHQ. See also: Equinix: We Didn’t Want to Stay Number-Two in Europe Forever Rifkind’s comments add to security concerns in the U.K. over Chinese investment, highlighted by Prime Minister Theresa May’s delay in approving the contract for the Hinkley Point nuclear-power project in which China would be a one-third owner. May acted in July. The company brushed aside security concerns, saying it would continue to comply with the guidance given in the U.K. government’s national security strategy. “There are no security issues relating to this financial transaction,” the company said in the statement, referring to the Times report. “Global Switch has no access to customer data whatsoever and only provides space, power, cooling and physical security,” according to the statement. “Neither Global Switch nor its shareholders can access the dedicated areas that house the customers’ servers.” |
| 6:16p | Virtualization as a Service: VMware Pitches MSPs  Brought to you by MSPmentor To understand the relationships between VMware’s neatly integrated virtualization and cloud management technologies is to gain a window into one possible future for technology solutions and managed services providers (MSPs). If the software maker’s bets are right, the pace of digital transformation is hurling organizations of all sizes toward a world shortly dominated by software defined data centers (SDDCs) and mastery of networking, computing and storage of IT workloads, across any clouds and from any tools. Geoffrey Waters, VMware’s vice president of service provider channel, is working to convince more and more MSPs to take a hard look at the vision his firm is pursuing – an approach he says could offer rich opportunities for sellers of managed services. “There’s two ways we can help service providers and MSPs,” he told MSPmentor during an afternoon chat at VMworld in Las Vegas this week. “We either help reduce their costs of managing their own clouds … or we give the ability to add new services to drive new revenue streams.” As part of that, VMware announced that IBM would become the first vCloud Air Network partner to offer its newly unveiled VMware Cloud Foundation platform on IBM Cloud. “VMware Cloud Foundation is basically our full SDDC stack,” Waters said. “So it’s networking, it’s compute and it’s storage, and then it packages it up in an automated way.” The cross-cloud-friendly platform – available as a service – gives customers freedom to select their own infrastructure and integrates other VMware products, including vSphere, Virtual SAN, NSX and SDDC Manager. “It takes that provisioning of the full stack and it reduces it from a matter of weeks and months, to literally hours,” Waters explained. “That’s going to be a huge time-to-market advantage.” Strong Adoption Nearly all of the Fortune 100 companies use VMware tools and adoption of the NSX network virtualization platform has increased more than 400 percent during the past year and a half, a data point celebrated throughout this week’s conference. Meanwhile, more than 500 VMware clients have already begun moving their environments to IBM Cloud, which reports that its footprint of 50 scalable data centers around the world continues to grow. “Enterprises need fast and easy ways to deploy and move workloads between on-premises and public cloud environments,” said Robert LeBlanc, senior vice president, IBM Cloud, in a statement announcing the enhanced partnership. “Our collaboration with VMware is becoming the glue for many organizations to scale and create new business opportunities while making the most of their existing IT investments in a hybrid cloud environment.” Wide adoption of VMware solutions is translating into strong momentum for the channel ecosystem, where 4,200 partners in 119 countries are serving about 99 percent of the cloud total addressable market, Waters said. “That means our network of partners across the globe are able to offer end users choice and flexibility on a local basis, so you can get your cloud on a local basis.” he said. “Think about data sovereignty. Think about the different compliances that people need. Think about the different vertical markets.” Managed Services ‘Around’ Cloud Within the complexity of those innumerable and byzantine domains lies a huge opportunity for technology solution and service providers, Waters said. “In essence, what we’re doing is we’re offering them our building blocks,” he said. “We have all the different products that we have and they’re basically leveraging them in an OPEX manner so they don’t have to buy it.” The vCloud Air Network program is targeted to services providers who currently or eventually plan to provide hosted services. “It’s them building some sort of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and then offering managed services around that,” Waters said. “And obviously, that’s very lucrative; those other services are very lucrative.” VMware’s future also finds a place for companies with no interest in infrastructure. “For the smaller players who don’t have the infrastructure – a lot of the, sort of, classic MSPs are working with our vCloud Air Network,” Waters said. “So that’s the OVH’s of the world, the Rackspaces’ of the world have a great program; IBM has a great channel program. Fusion is another one that has another great MSP program.” “They’re tapping into the infrastructure of all these service providers.” This first ran at http://mspmentor.net/msp-mentor/virtuali |
| 7:20p | Largest Google Data Center in Asia Plugs into FASTER Cable The largest Google data center in Asia is now connected to the recently launched US-Japan submarine cable, speeding up Google services for everybody in the region, according to the Alphabet subsidiary. Google is a member of the consortium that funded construction of the FASTER cable system, which came online this past June. The cable, however, lands in Bandon, Oregon, on the US side and in Chikura and Shima, Japan, as well as in Taishui, Taiwan. The fiber-optic link between Japan and Taiwan, where the largest Google data center in Asia is located, was lit up just recently, enabling speeds up to 26 terabits per second for Google users across Asia. To put that bandwidth metric in perspective, it would be enough for every person in Taiwan to send a selfie to somebody in Japan every 15 seconds, totaling 138 billion selfies a day, according to Google. See also: Data Center Connectivity: Dare to Bypass New York? The two Google data centers in Asia came online in 2013. The company spent $600 million to build the Taiwan facility in Changhua County and $500 million on the second one, in Singapore, including the ongoing expansion project announced last year.  This facility in Singapore is Google’s first custom-built, two-story data center. The design saves money by allowing Google to build up, not out, in Singapore’s pricey real estate market. (Photo: Google) Not only are half of the world’s internet users located in Asia, their number is growing faster in the region than anywhere else, which is why Google – and many other service providers – is investing so much money in infrastructure in Asia. A little over 48.3 percent of internet users globally were in Asia as of July 2013, according to Internet Live Stats. There were about 2.73 billion internet users in the world at that point. Today, there are about 3.54 billion. See also: Ten Most Connected Data Centers Google’s involvement in the FASTER project illustrates a broader shift in the balance of power in the submarine cable world. Traditionally, the consortia that led these projects, which cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take many years to complete, consisted of privately and publicly owned telcos. But as internet giants like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon grow their international reach, their bandwidth needs are growing so fast that they are now taking on bigger and more direct roles in these projects than just being the cable operators’ customers. Microsoft and Facebook are bankrolling a cable across the Atlantic, which will land in Virginia and Spain, and Amazon’s cloud business, Amazon Web Services, made an investment in a transpacific cable that will boost bandwidth between US, Australia, and New Zealand. Amazon’s agreement to become the cable’s fourth anchor customer was what made the project possible, providing the last portion of funding that was necessary to kick it off. See also: Transpacific Data Center Connectivity Hub Launches in Seattle |
| 8:24p | Digital Signage Firm Buys Former EDS Data Center in Dayton Stratacache, a company that specializes in infrastructure and content for digital signage, has acquired a big data center in Dayton, Ohio, which used to support multiple GM manufacturing plants. It is an unusual move nowadays, when companies that provide services like Stratacache’s rely primarily on public cloud and other types of third-party infrastructure services instead of investing in their own data centers. But Stratacache management expects the investment to enable it to serve its customers better. Chris Reigel, CEO, Stratacache:
The Dayton-based company provides three types of solutions, all geared to help customers manage the delivery of their digital marketing content: digital signage, content acceleration, and content distribution. It does everything from lighting up advertising displays on city streets to delivering content to TV screens in Costco stores. The data center it acquired was built for EDS (Electronic Data Services), the professional services company founded in the early 60s by Ross Perot. In 1984 it was acquired by GM for $2.5 billion and later, in 2008, by Hewlett-Packard for $13.9 billion. HP took ownership of 100 EDS data centers in that transaction, which it later whittled down to 50 through a big consolidation initiative. The building in Dayton is huge. It has 113,000 square feet of raised floor and a network operations space that fits 550 support desks, which will be occupied by Stratacache’s primary global support and operations center. It also has three diesel generators, complete with underground fuel tanks, and dual utility feeds. It will provide new data center capacity for a company growing quickly through acquisitions. In August it acquired Scala, another digital signage company, following acquisition of a digital outdoor menu board specialist called Vertigo in June. Last year, Stratacache bought PRN, which specializes in marketing via in-store displays. |
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